Meet the Maker Crafting Visually Arresting Ceramics Inspired by Nature

Years later, she enrolled at the Columbus College of Art & Design and received an M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she largely experimented with photography-based collage. After graduation, she worked at a nonprofit art magazine in Woodstock, New York, then spent a stint sailing in the Caribbean, before meeting her husband and settling in South Florida.

That southward migration, she says, had a formative effect on her artistic point of view. While her previous work was influenced by the monochromatic steel mills and urban decay of the Great Lakes where she grew up, relocating to Florida felt like a rebirth. “It was this color explosion,” she remembers. “My art went from doom and gloom to joy and love.”

Following the birth of her son, O’Brien began teaching art to children in Gulfstream, Florida. The experience re-awakened her love of ceramics and propelled her on a new professional path. “I remember making this humongous pot, which I took to Kemble Interiors in Palm Beach,” she recalls. “Celerie happened to be there and loved it. She and the studio founder, Mimi Maddock McMakin, are the ones who started me on my journey.”

Since launching her ceramics practice two decades ago, O’Brien has evolved her style, replacing her initial heavy pieces with flat, smooth surfaces with today’s assortment of lighter, three-dimensional works that are alive with fluidity and texture. The artist continues to find inspiration by foraging, often during the endurance races she routinely runs. On a recent 100K from Lake Okeechobee to Hobe Sound, she stopped to marvel at twisted twigs and lacy leaves, remembering with vivid clarity the flowering orchids that cascaded from a canopy of trees overhead.

Fungus and mushrooms are another of O’Brien’s enduring fascinations, as revealed through her selection of cachepots and vases adorned with quivering gills. “I want people to touch these pieces,” she says of her tactile lamps, vases, planters, and pots. “One woman said to me the reason she liked my work is because it doesn’t need plants—it has so much movement and life on its own.”

Indeed the tactile nature of her work is one of O’Brien’s favorite elements of her ceramics practice. “As an artist, I have to have my hand in all of it,” she says of her multi-stepped creative process, be it shaping, trimming, appliquéing, or glazing. “I don’t use molds so any vein you see on a leaf, for example, is marked by me.”

Whether she’s working on a unique commission or one of her highly coveted designs, O’Brien admittedly savors every second of her time in the studio. “I want people to be happy,” she says with a smile. “I’m trying to make the world a prettier place and elicit joy when people look at my work.”